Killing Rhinos

by Herb Hughes

  “That is absolute rubbish, Diana. Our genetics are different and would stay different even if we lost our technology. We are not them anymore, and never will be again.”

  “Rubbish? It is not ‘rubbish!’ You say you don’t want to kill them, but I know better. I’ve heard your mumblings. You can’t wait until the day you blast that planet away and murder every single one of them. You’re looking forward to it. You are the one who’s mentally sick, Ethan, not me!”

  Ethan rolled his eyes back in his head.

  “Listen to me!” Diana demanded. “This is not farming, not by any reasonable definition. This is murder, organized, state-sponsored murder! There is no other word for what you are doing, what I was doing up till now, but I’m not going to do it anymore.”

  “You are correct about that! For the rest of your tour, you will be confined to quarters. When your replacement arrives, you will be sedated and returned for treatment. You are no longer in charge of anything, not even your own quarters. I have assumed all your voice controls. You will be fed through a slot in your door. You can no longer access the computer so you can no longer do any damage. Good day, Diana.”

  Ethan turned sharply and left. When the door swished closed, he ordered Central to secure the door and open only on his command. He was determined that the only opening to Diana’s quarters would be the meal service slot. Otherwise, the door would not be opened before she was taken from the station and placed on the return shuttle. Just as well, Ethan thought. The nerve of her, calling me a murderer. Mental illness! In this day and age! Who would ever have imagined?

  Alone in her room, the door secured against her, Diana smiled to herself. She walked into her storage closet, slid her uniforms aside, and pulled off a panel from the back wall. The panel was supposed to be securely fastened to the wall struts, like wall panels throughout the space station, and, indeed, it looked as though it was. She had disguised it well. She reached into the thin cavity in the wall, behind where the panel had been, and pulled out a roll of plastic then unfurled it on a table and stared at it a moment.

  It was an old-fashioned flexscreen with integral flexboard, a gift from her father on her tenth birthday. They were long obsolete by the time she got it, but the flexscreen had belonged to her great-great-great-grandfather when he was a child, and her father wanted her to have it for sentimental reasons. Her great-great-great-grandfather had been a human, not a posthuman. She loved this old flexscreen.

  How fortunate, she thought, that she had had the foresight to install a mini-node and ‘Quietconnect’ when she first came on board. They were concealed inside the removable wall panel and were coded so that Central would not even know it was being accessed. She could not access the mini-node through her implants or from outside her room, but she could access it through the flexscreen. It would suffice.

  As she looked over the flexboard, which was at the lower part of the flexscreen, she realized it had been a long time since she had physically typed something into a computer, but as she began tapping the key images, she also realized that her old skills had never left her. She could still input the words quickly, without having to think about where the letters were located.

  Diana tapped the last letter with a flare to her finger movement then looked up and smiled as she watched the door to her quarters open. “So much for imprisonment,” she whispered to no one. She typed another command, and the door closed with a ‘swoosh.’ She accessed Central’s facility data files and erased the record of the door ever having opened or closed. She was the only one who would ever know what she had done. Finally, her smile even broader, she rolled the flexboard up and tucked it back into its hiding place. Only when necessary.

  Diana had no particular plan, but she knew if and when a plan developed, she would be able to move about the ship as she needed to. Central would be none the wiser.

  Chapter 41

  The Spine, silhouetted against a star-lit desert sky, was a black wave rising out of the earth. The smooth arc at the end of the Spine, curving down and disappearing into the ground, told them they had reached their destination. At night it was easier to see where the roof of the underground room had weakened and crumbled to the floor because of the steady glow coming out of the hole. If this had been in another area, somewhere closer to civilization, it would be world news in short order. But no one came this way, no one except a lost old man wandering around in the desert with a stubborn mule.

  Avery pulled the car as close as he dared. It was a heavy vehicle. He did not want to get too close to the hole for fear of collapsing the desert floor, the roof of the underground room, even further. They grabbed the rope ladder they had brought and walked the rest of the way.

  “This is incredible,” Avery said as he leaned over the edge and looked into the hole. “I can’t wait to see inside.”

  Jack tied the rope ladder around the same rock Mac had used. Mac’s rope was still there, so Jack hauled it up to get it out of the way.

  Having discovered the hole in the first place, Mac led the way. The rope ladder was long enough to go to the floor but came to rest against the debris pile. There were no slips and no scratches this time as Mac used a combination of the debris pile and the rope ladder to descend. Avery and Jack followed one at a time.

  “Astounding!” Avery exclaimed as he looked around the huge room.

  “Could this have been built by people from Earth?” Jack asked. “Perhaps before they left for good? Or maybe even before they brought us here?”

  “I don’t believe so,” Avery said as he kicked the layer of dust on the floor. “This place is old. Ancient. And the technology. The walls literally glow from some unseen but endless power source. I do not think Earth could have done this. I believe it was built by the same beings who constructed the Spine. After all, it's located where the Spine comes to an end.”

  “Makes sense,” Jack said. He picked up a piece of the tubing that was in the debris grid.

  Avery was looking over the ruins as well. He picked up a small handful of powder from one of the dust piles, sniffed it, rubbed it between his fingers then brushed his hands over the pile to knock the dust off. He shrugged his shoulders and said, “I cannot determine what this powder is. There is a faint order, but it is not something I recognize.”

  “Let me show you the metal people,” Mac said. “But you don’t have to worry. They’re all dead.”

  They walked over to where the first robot was sprawled awkwardly on the floor. Mac stood a few steps back, pointing at it as though it could spring to life at any moment. “Damnedest thing I ever seen,” he said.

  Avery bent over and examined the arms and tracked feet one at a time, picking each up and looking closely. He looked over the body then tried to twist the head. It rotated, but it took quite an effort to make it do so.

  “A robot,” he announced. “Quite sophisticated compared to the pictures of robots I’ve seen in Earth books. There isn’t much metal in it, but I don’t recognize most of these materials. The people, beings, or who or whatever built this, were far more advanced than the people of Earth. The technology is astonishing.”

  “Let’s go,” Mac said eagerly. “It’s a long walk to the last room, but you’ve got to see the tank of water and the gray thing that’s swimming in it. Like I was telling you.” Mac set off at a fast pace for an old man. Jack and Avery followed quickly.

  “Wittle de wee in a fonsat tree. How can I keep from looking at me? There’s a hole in the world that I can see so, wittle de, wittle de, wittle de wee. Oh wondrous and gracious self, have you a, a… Did you hear that? Listen closely.

  “You’re hearing things again?

  “The last thing I heard was real. It was the creature. Oh, wonders. Do you think it’s come back?

  “I hope not, useless self. If it has, it would be to destroy us.

  “Listen carefully! Yes, I hear it. It’s the creature thing talking. I hear its voice… wait. Yes, yes, yes. I hear other voices. Oh, beautiful self, it is
not alone. It has brought help. We’re saved!

  “It’s brought help to destroy us, stupid self. Nobody is going to save your uselessness. Why would anybody want you around? No, they’ve come to destroy us and get it over with. I guess it doesn’t matter. I never wanted to be jelly anyway.

  “Look! There they are! And there are three of them.

  “My gracious, but they’re all so ugly. But, notice loathsome self, the other two are not wearing rags. Their clothes are not torn and filthy, but they are strange. What curious creatures!”

  “Here it is,” Mac said as he ran to the only full tower of cubes that remained. He pointed to the lowest cube and said, “This is the only one that still has water in it. And that gray glob is bigger than the others. It doesn’t have any black on it, either.”

  Avery stared at the gray glob then turned to Jack with his mouth wide open in shock. “That… It looks like a brain,” Avery said.

  “That’s it!” Mac said. “A brain! I knew it looked like something I remembered from a long time ago, but I couldn’t remember what. But that’s what it is, all right. I seen one in a book when I was a young’un.”

  “I can’t believe this,” Avery said. “It is a brain, but… It’s not human. It’s close, but it’s not. It’s larger than a human brain. And it’s shaped differently. But it’s not all that different. My, God! There’s no other possibility. This is a brain, an alien brain! It is preserved in some type of clear fluid. Amazing. I must dissect it and study it. We can learn a lot about the beings who used to inhabit this planet.”

  Jack looked around the room then up to the top of the rack in the corner where it had not yet collapsed on the floor. He silently counted the number of cubes in the vertical stack. “From the looks of it,” he said, “There were millions of brains. The cubes were stacked twenty high before they all started collapsing. There’s hundreds across and many hundreds long, all multiplied by twenty. That’s a lot of brains in this one room. There are twelve rooms in this row and twelve more in the next row. We don’t know how many more rows are off to the side, but I saw two more sets of doors, receding into the distance, in each room we went through. That’s a minimum of four rows and each row has twelve huge rooms.”

  “I’ll be a drunk lizard,” Mac said. “That’s a big load of brains, for sure.”

  “Yes, but my point is, why would they preserve millions, perhaps billions of brains? It doesn’t make sense to save that many dead brains. Why didn’t they bury them? Or cremate them?”

  “What are you saying?” Avery asked. Then his eyes got wide as the realization began to dawn on him. “Oh! I understand. One or two or a handful of brains and we’ve got a science lab. A few hundred or even a few thousand brains and we’ve got a bizarre ritual of some sort. But millions of brains? There’s only one explanation. These brains were not dead when they were placed in here. They were alive!”

  “Well, dag nab it, why in tarnation would they take a perfectly good brain out of its body and put it in one of these little tanks? Or maybe they didn’t have bodies. Say, you don’t think this one here is still alive, do you?

  “Oh, my,” Avery said. “All these brains have been decaying and turning to dust. The framework collapses one cube at a time, twenty of them, so every pile of dust in the grids is… twenty… Oh, my.” He started wiping his fingers on his clothes.

  “Yeah,” Jack said. “Each dust pile is twenty decayed and dried alien brains.”

  “But why would any fool take his brain out of his body?” Mac asked again. “There’s no use in it.”

  “I have no idea,” Avery answered. “Look at this. There’s a cable hanging loose from the bottom cube.” Avery fiddled with the end of the cable a moment. “There’s a crossed metal prong at the end. Let’s see... And a hole in the rail that’s a reverse match for the prong. Male-female connection. Unless I miss my guess, it should slide right in.”

  He inserted the ‘+’ shaped metal prong into the corresponding hole in the bottom rail on the side of the cube. The moment the cable was connected, a torrent of ear-splitting sound blasted into the room, causing the three of them to jump backward as they covered their ears. Avery leaned over and jerked the prong out.

  “Well, slap me with a mule’s tail,” Mac said. “What the cold willies was that?”

  “Let’s see…” Kneeling on the floor, Avery fiddled with the rail. There was a small knob near the connection that slid back and forth. “I wonder if this will have something to do with it.” He reinserted the prong, and, once again, the massive sound blasted through the room, echoing off the walls. He slid the knob to the left, and the volume lowered. He slid it further, and the sound became bearable.

  “That’s much better,” Avery said as he stood up.

  They listened to the sounds carefully. The noises spilling from the two small holes were strange but distinct, ordered and purposeful.

  “It sounds like someone is trying to talk but doesn’t know how,” Mac said.

  “Perhaps,” Avery said. “There are definite patterns to the sound.”

  “I think you’re right, Mac,” Jack said. “I may be wrong, but the sound could be coming from this last brain. It could be alive!”

  “Let’s not be too hasty,” Avery said. “The chances of this brain being alive after all this time are, well, virtually nonexistent. It is likely a recording of some sort. Hmmmm…. But think of the implications if it were alive. The brain of an intelligent being from a long-lost and highly sophisticated technological race? It would be monumental!”

  “Maybe,” Mac said. “But this is nothing but useless noise. It don’t mean a thing to me.”

  “Sadly, that’s true,” Avery admitted. “If there were a way to learn their language... Perhaps they left some sort of Rosetta Stone around here. If we could find it…”

  “I don’t know,” Jack said. “It doesn’t sound like a recording. It keeps stopping as though it is saying something then listening for a response. Maybe it’s asking questions. Should we try to talk to it?”

  The three were silent for a moment, but the sounds from the two small holes in the cube rail continued in the stop and go pattern. Mac stepped up to the cube and bent over then slowly and carefully said, “Hel-lo.”

  The noise coming out of the two small holes stopped altogether.

  “Hel-lo,” Mac repeated.

  The room became totally quiet. Mac glanced back at Avery and Jack a moment, then turned back to the brain and said again, “Hel-loooo.”

  “A squeaky voice answered, “Hel-loooo.” Then a deeper voice said, “Hel-loooo.”

  Avery’s eyes widened almost larger than his head. “It is alive!” he shouted.

  “It is alive,” the squeaky voice said. “It is alive,” the deep voice repeated.

  The three men stood in silence a moment then Mac said, “I don’t see but one brain in there but it sure sounds like there’s two of them. One sounds like a man and the other sounds like a little girl. Or something funny like that.”

  The squeaky voice repeated Mac’s entire statement word-for-word then the deep voice did the same.

  “Just one brain,” Jack affirmed. “Maybe it’s trying two different sounds to make sure we understand.”

  Once again, when Jack finished speaking the two voices recreated his statement flawlessly.

  “This is most definitely an alien brain!” Avery said. “There is no telling what its life was like. Perhaps there are two beings in every brain. Who knows? Whatever it is, this is a phenomenal find.”

  Both voices meticulously repeated Avery’s entire statement. Avery motioned for Mac and Jack to follow him, and he stepped away and lowered his voice. “It is hard to carry on a conversation with that brain repeating everything we say, twice.”

  “It learns so quickly,” Jack said. “It must be brilliant.”

  “Perhaps,” Avery said. “It could also be like a bird that repeats what you say without understanding, but I doubt it. This brain can repeat long, complicated
sentences after hearing it once. I think we are dealing with a highly sophisticated intelligence. Perhaps I could teach it our language in a relatively short period of time. It’s worth a try. Imagine if we could communicate with it. Think of all the things we could learn from such an advanced being.”

  The strange sounds started again.

  “This is getting us nowhere quick, trash self, and we’re quite used to going nowhere. We’ve done it for all the millennia since everything broke and the dreams ended. I hear their words, and I can say their words, but I have no idea what they mean. As far as I’m concerned, we don’t need these creatures. We can go nowhere without them easily enough.

  “Oh, but revered self, they do have words. And they are intelligent. They fixed the sound out thing.

  “Any simpleton with fingers could have done that. Maybe the cable was knocked off when part of the framework fell. All they had to do was plug it back in. A simpleton’s job!

  “Simpletons, perhaps, but they are our simpletons. They did it for us. So they don’t want to hurt us. If they did, they already would have.

  “Good point, pathetic self.”

  “I must stay here and work with it,” Avery said.

  “You’re going to teach the brain how to talk?” Jack asked.

  “Yes, of course. This is far too important. All the other brains are dead. We must save this last one. And we must be able to communicate with it to know how to save it. If I teach it our language, I can find out what killed the other brains and, hopefully, stop it from killing this last one. But, more importantly to our world, perhaps it can help us with the Rhinos. They’re from the same planet. It is critical that we keep this brain from suffering the same fate as the others. The future of our civilization could depend on it.”

  “I didn’t think about that,” Jack said. “But how are you going to teach it our language? It is repeating our words, but it can’t know what they mean.”